Last weekend, Steven Covey still had a job.

As a stagehand, he has spent the past decade bringing Miami performances to life through mainly projection work. Most of his jobs come from the Adrienne Arsht Center, but he also tours with Miami City Ballet and picks up work at smaller theaters through the Local 500 branch of his labor union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). Aside from the ballet, which employs him directly, the union facilitates each of his gigs.

Many Miami venues began canceling or postponing performances last week in response to the growing presence of the novel coronavirus across the United States. At the time, Covey was still warehouse-prepping for the ballet’s upcoming tour of Don Quixote, which was scheduled to open in West Palm Beach this month.

However, it soon became clear that things were changing more rapidly than anyone had anticipated.

On Saturday, March 14, Covey was at the Arsht Center’s concert hall setting up audio equipment, chairs, and music stands for an audience-less performance by a local orchestra, which was planned to be livestreamed. “We were set up, we were just coming back from lunch waiting for rehearsal to start, and then before the orchestra members started to come in, somebody made the call that it was a bad idea to have that many people in a small space,” Covey says. “Even without an audience, we still had like 60 people in a space together.”

With the event called off, he and his team began to disassemble the work they had done. As they wrapped up, several began to get phone calls requesting them for another job the next morning: The blockbuster musical Hamilton had canceled its remaining tour performances, and workers were needed for an emergency loadout of all the show’s equipment.

Covey decided to take the job. “I ended up going in to help out because everything else was canceled, and it looked like that might be the last day of work that was happening for a while.”

It turned out he was right.

Read the full story at Miami New Times.

Photo by Justin Namon, via Miami New Times